Frankfurt kitchen
Encyclopedia
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, considered the fore-runner of modern fitted kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen
Kitchen
A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation.In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a...
built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low cost. It was designed in 1926 by Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was the first female Austrian architect and an activist in the Nazi resistance movement. She is mostly remembered today for designing the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen.-Training:...
for the social housing project Römerstadt in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, of architect Ernst May
Ernst May
Ernst May was a German architect and city planner.May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during Germany's Weimar period, and in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule...
. Some 10,000 units were built in the late 1920s in Frankfurt.
Motivation and influences
German cities after the end of World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
were plagued by a serious housing shortage. Various social housing projects were built in the 1920s to increase the number of rental apartment
Apartment
An apartment or flat is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building...
s. These large-scale projects had to provide affordable apartments for a great number of typical working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
families and thus were subject to tight budget constraints. As a consequence, the apartments designed were comfortable but not spacious, and so the architects sought to reduce costs by applying one design for large numbers of apartments.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was the first female Austrian architect and an activist in the Nazi resistance movement. She is mostly remembered today for designing the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen.-Training:...
's design of the kitchen for the Römerstadt thus had to solve the problem of how to build many kitchens, without allowing it to occupy too much of the total space of the apartment. Her design departed from the then common kitchen-cum-living room. The typical worker's household lived in a two-room apartment, in which the kitchen served many functions at once: besides cooking, one dined, lived, bathed, and even slept there, while the second room, intended as the parlour
Parlour
Parlour , from the French word parloir, from parler , denotes an "audience chamber". In parts of the United Kingdom and the United States, parlours are common names for certain types of food service houses, restaurants or special service areas, such as tattoo parlors...
, often was reserved for special occasions such as a rare Sunday dinner. Instead, Schütte-Lihotzky's kitchen was a small separate room, connected to the living room by a sliding door; thus separating the functions of work (cooking etc.) from those of living and relaxing, consistent with her view about life:
- Erstens besteht es in Arbeit, und zweitens in Ausruhen, Gesellschaft, Genuß.
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- "Firstly, it [life] is work, and secondly it is relaxing, company, pleasures."
- — Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky in Schlesisches Heim 8/1921
Schütte-Lihotzky's design was strongly influenced by the ideas of Taylorism, which was en vogue at the beginning of the 20th century. Started by Catharine Beecher
Catharine Beecher
Catharine Esther Beecher was an American educator known for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education....
in the middle of the 19th century and reinforced by Christine Frederick
Christine Frederick
Christine Isobel McGaffey Frederick was an American home economist and early 20th century exponent of Taylorism as applied to the domestic sphere. She conducted experiments aimed at improving household efficiency, as well as arguing for women's vital role as consumers in a mass-production economy...
's publications in the 1910s, the growing trend that called for viewing household work as a true profession
Profession
A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain....
had the logical consequence that the industrial optimisation pioneered by Taylorism spilled over into the domestic area. Frederick's The New Housekeeping, which argued for rationalising the work in the kitchen using a Taylorist approach, had been translated into German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
under the title Die rationelle Haushaltsführung in 1922. These ideas were received well in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
and formed the base of German architect Erna Meyer's work and were also instrumental in Schütte-Lihotzky's design of the Frankfurt kitchen. She did detailed time-motion studies
Time and motion study
A time and motion study is a business efficiency technique combining the Time Study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the Motion Study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth . It is a major part of scientific management...
to determine how long each processing step in the kitchen took, re-designed and optimised workflows, and planned her kitchen design such that it should optimally support these workflows. Improving the ergonomics
Ergonomics
Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities.The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics as follows:...
of the kitchen and rationalising the kitchen work was important to her:
- Das Problem, die Arbeit der Hausfrau rationeller zu gestalten, ist fast für alle Schichten der Bevölkerung von gleicher Wichtigkeit. Sowohl die Frauen des Mittelstandes, die vielfach ohne irgendwelche Hilfe im Haus wirtschaften, als auch Frauen des Arbeiterstandes, die häufig noch anderer Berufsarbeit nachgehen müssen, sind so überlastet, daß ihre Überarbeitung auf die Dauer nicht ohne Folgen für die gesamte Volksgesundheit bleiben kann.
-
- "The problem of rationalising the housewifeHousewifeHousewife is a term used to describe a married woman with household responsibilities who is not employed outside the home. Merriam Webster describes a housewife as a married woman who is in charge of her household...
's work is equally important to all classes of the society. Both the middle-class women, who often work without any help [i.e. without servants] in their homes, and also the women of the worker class, who often have to work in other jobs, are overworked to the point that their stress is bound to have serious consequences for public healthPublic healthPublic health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals" . It is concerned with threats to health based on population health...
at large."
- "The problem of rationalising the housewife
- — Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Das neue Frankfurt, 5/1926-1927
This quote succinctly sums up the reasons for the appeal of Taylorism at the time. On the one hand, the trend to rationalise the household was reinforced by the intention to reduce the time spent in (economically speaking) "unproductive" housework, so that women had more time for factory work. On the other hand, emancipatory efforts to improve women's status
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
, also in the home, called for rationalisation to relieve women and enable them to pursue other interests.
Schütte-Lihotzky was strongly inspired by the extremely space-constrained railway dining car
Dining car
A dining car or restaurant carriage , also diner, is a railroad passenger car that serves meals in the manner of a full-service, sit-down restaurant....
kitchens, which she saw as a Taylorist ideal: even though these were very small, two people could prepare and serve the meals for about 100 guests, and then wash and store the dishes.
Kitchen plan
The resulting Frankfurt kitchen was a narrow double-file kitchen measuring 1.9 m by 3.4 m. The kitchen had a separate entrance in one of the short walls, opposite which was the window. Along the left side (as seen from the entrance), the stoveStove
A stove is an enclosed heated space. The term is commonly taken to mean an enclosed space in which fuel is burned to provide heating, either to heat the space in which the stove is situated or to heat the stove itself, and items placed on it...
was placed, followed by a sliding door
Sliding door
A sliding door is a type of door which opens horizontally by sliding, whereby the door is either mounted on or suspended from a track. Types of sliding doors include pocket doors, Arcadia doors, and bypass doors...
connecting the kitchen to the dining and living room. On the right wall were cabinets and the sink, in front of the window a workspace. There was no refrigerator
Refrigerator
A refrigerator is a common household appliance that consists of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump that transfers heat from the inside of the fridge to its external environment so that the inside of the fridge is cooled to a temperature below the ambient temperature of the room...
, but a foldable ironing board, visible in the image folded against the left wall.
The narrow layout of the kitchen was not due solely to the space constraints mentioned above, it was equally a conscious design decision in a very Taylorist attempt to minimise the number of steps needed when working in the kitchen. The sliding door also helped minimise the walking distance between the kitchen and the table in the adjacent room.
Dedicated, labelled storage bins for common ingredients such as flour
Flour
Flour is a powder which is made by grinding cereal grains, other seeds or roots . It is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures, making the availability of adequate supplies of flour a major economic and political issue at various times throughout history...
, sugar
Sugar
Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...
, rice
Rice
Rice is the seed of the monocot plants Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the West Indies...
and others were intended to keep the kitchen tidy and well-organised; the workspace had an integrated, removable "garbage drawer" such that scraps could just be shoved into it while working and the whole thing emptied at once afterwards.
Because conventional kitchen furniture of the time fit neither the new workflows nor the narrow space, the Frankfurt kitchen was installed complete with furniture and major appliances such as the stove, a novelty at that time in Germany. It was the first fitted kitchen. The wooden door and drawer fronts were painted blue because researchers had found that flies
Fly
True flies are insects of the order Diptera . They possess a pair of wings on the mesothorax and a pair of halteres, derived from the hind wings, on the metathorax...
avoided blue surfaces. Lihotzky used oak
Oak
An oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus , of which about 600 species exist. "Oak" may also appear in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus...
wood for flour containers, because it repelled mealworms, and beech
Beech
Beech is a genus of ten species of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Europe, Asia and North America.-Habit:...
for table tops because beech is resistant to staining, acids, and knifemarks. The seating was a revolving stool on castors for maximum flexibility.
User acceptance
Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt kitchen was installed in some 10,000 units in Frankfurt and as such was a commercial success. The cost of a single kitchen, fully equipped, was moderate (a few hundred ReichsmarkGerman reichsmark
The Reichsmark was the currency in Germany from 1924 until June 20, 1948. The Reichsmark was subdivided into 100 Reichspfennig.-History:...
); the costs were passed on to the rent (which reportedly increased the rents by 1 RM per month).
However, the users of these kitchens often had their difficulties with them. Unaccustomed to Schütte-Lihotzky's custom-designed workflows for which the kitchen was optimised, they often were at loss as to how to use the kitchen. It was frequently described as not flexible enough—the dedicated storage bins often were used for other things than their labels said. Another problem with these bins was that they were easily reachable by small children. Schütte-Lihotzky had designed the kitchen for one adult person only, children or even a second adult had not entered the picture, and in fact, the kitchen was too small for two people to work in. Even one person often was hampered by open cabinet doors.
Most contemporary criticism concentrated on such rather technical aspects. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt kitchen became a model for a modern work kitchen. For the rest of the 20th century, the small, rationalised work kitchen was a standard in tenement buildings throughout Europe.
Sociological
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
aspects of the "work kitchen" were criticised only much later, in the 1970s and 80s, when feminist criticism found that the emancipatory intentions that had in part motivated the development of the work kitchen had actually backfired: precisely because of the specialised rationalisation and the small size of these kitchens such that only one person could work comfortably, housewives tended to become isolated from the life in the rest of the house. What had started as an emancipatory attempt (although all proponents such as Beecher, Frederick, or Meyer had always implicitly assumed that the kitchen was the woman's domain) to professionalise and revalue work in the home was now seen as a confinement of the woman to the kitchen.
The Frankfurt kitchen today
When the public interest on the work of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in the late 1990s was growing, most kitchens did not exist any more. Some homeowners have built replicas; a very few originals still exist. The original house Im Burgfeld 136, Frankfurt was chosen to be a museum because of the surviving Frankfurt kitchen.
In 2005 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a 'Frankfurt' kitchen for its traveling exhibition "Modernism: Designing a New World" with stops in London, the USA and Germany. The kitchen was dismantled from its original place, restored and repainted.
Original kitchens on auctions
One kitchen was sold in 2005 for 22,680 €, another for 34,200. But these prices seem to apply only for the classic type: a white variation without the characteristic wall cupboard was sold for 11,000€Other furniture with the original drawers
Auctions sometimes feature the original drawers. In 2010, a piece of furniture with six drawers was sold for 380,-€, another with ten for 1000,-€ and another with nine for 1200-€.The Frankfurt kitchen in museums
The Frankfurt kitchen is found in the following public collections:- Historical museum, FrankfurtHistorical museum, FrankfurtThe Historical Museum in Frankfurt am Main was founded in 1878, and includes cultural and historical objects relating to the city's history...
- Germanisches NationalmuseumGermanisches NationalmuseumThe Germanisches Nationalmuseum is a museum in Nuremberg, Germany. Founded in 1852, houses a large collection of items relating to German culture and art extending from prehistoric times through to the present day...
, Nuremberg - Design collection of the University of WuppertalUniversity of WuppertalThe University of Wuppertal is a German scientific institution, located in Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia.The university, the full German name of which is Bergische Universität Wuppertal , was formed in 1972 and is located in the city of Wuppertal, within the state of North Rhine-Westphalia,...
, Germany - Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe
- Museum of Applied Arts (MAK)Museum für angewandte Kunst WienThe Museum of Applied Arts or just MAK, a short version of its German name Museum für angewandte Kunst is located in Vienna, Austria.The museum is located in the 1st district of Vienna .-External links:*...
, ViennaViennaVienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
(Reconstruction) - Minneapolis Institute of ArtsMinneapolis Institute of ArtsThe Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a fine art museum located in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a campus that covers nearly 8 acres , formerly Morrison Park...
, Minneapolis, MinnesotaMinnesotaMinnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state... - Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New YorkNew YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east... - Victoria and Albert MuseumVictoria and Albert MuseumThe Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
, LondonLondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
Variations and further developments
Schütte-Lihotzky did not just design "the" Frankfurt kitchen — she actually designed three different variations of it. Type 1, the one described here, was the most common and least costly. She also designed "Type 2" and "Type 3" kitchens based on the same concept, but these were larger, had tables, and were spacious enough for one or even two additional persons to help in the kitchen. These two latter types, however, did not have the impact her "Type 1" model had.Erna Meyer responded to the criticisms of the Frankfurt kitchen with her Stuttgart kitchen, presented in 1927. It was slightly larger and had a more square ground plan, and used unit furniture in an attempt to make it adaptable to both the future users' needs and different room shapes.
External links
- "The Joy of Not Cooking," The Atlantic, May 2011.
- Die "Frankfurter Küche" – very thorough, but also in German. (PDF, 208 kBKilobyteThe kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
) - The "Monats-Anzeiger", Nr. 276 (March 2004) of the Germanisches NationalmuseumGermanisches NationalmuseumThe Germanisches Nationalmuseum is a museum in Nuremberg, Germany. Founded in 1852, houses a large collection of items relating to German culture and art extending from prehistoric times through to the present day...
in NurembergNurembergNuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...
has a section of the Frankfurt kitchen with description (in German) and images. - Guardian article on the Frankfurt kitchen
- V&A Museum exhibit
- Jerram, L.: Kitchen Sink Dramas: Women, Modernity and Space in Weimar Germany, Cultural Geographies 13(4), pp. 538–556; 2006.
- Frankfurt Kitchen Installation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
- reconstruction Frankfurt Kitchen in the http://www.mak.at/Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) ViennaViennaVienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
] - Design Keuken